[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 39 (Thursday, April 11, 2002)]
[House]
[Pages H1275-H1280]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             WELFARE REFORM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2001, the gentlewoman from Hawaii (Mrs. Mink) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mrs. MINK of Hawaii. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the minority leader's 
designation of this hour to the discussion of welfare reform.
  The Bush administration has submitted various proposals. Most of them 
go to the technicalities of States' performance and percentages of 
people that must be in a work program. They have increased the work 
requirements from 30 hours to 40 hours, with some allowance for the use 
of 16 hours for other than actual work activity. But in most cases the 
administration's proposals do not go to the matter of the actual 
recipients and families that have been affected by the many changes 
that we made in 1996.
  I do not think there is any dispute on either side of the aisle that 
the provision of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act did dramatically lower the 
number of welfare recipients all across the country. This was because 
there were mandatory requirements on work. If you did not work, if you 
did not register for work, if you did not go into some sort of a work 
project, you would lose the cash assistance. Therefore, the numbers 
that fell dramatically to about 50 percent of what they were in 1996 is 
basically because of the rules that were included in the 1996 TANF 
legislation.
  The requirement to work has removed many of these families from the 
welfare roles. The problem with just removing these families from the 
welfare roles, however, is that they have simply gone to dead-end jobs, 
most of them earning minimum wage, perhaps some as much as $6 or $7 an 
hour, but that is it. So most of these families remain under the 
poverty level and, therefore, continue to be a responsibility of the 
national and State governments.

                              {time}  1715

  They continue to be eligible for housing support. They continue to be 
eligible for food stamps. They are eligible for Medicaid allowances and 
are, of course, as former TANF recipients, going to work under the TANF 
rules entitled to significant amounts of child care support.
  The object of welfare reform, it seems to me, is to really take a 
look at the outcomes, not simply the mechanisms; what percentage, 50 
percent, 60 percent are at work. The mechanisms have been proven to 
work, partly because of the flexibility that the States have been given 
to implement these new requirements.
  The real way that we can measure the success of welfare reform, it 
seems to me, is to look at the quality of the family life after they 
have left welfare. Are these families earning sufficient funds to 
really take their family out of poverty, out of all of the support 
services that the poor in this country are entitled to? I think the 
answer to that question is that the substantial majority of families 
that have gone off welfare are still poor, are still below poverty and 
are still dependent upon the wide variety of support mechanisms that 
are there for the poor in America. So, therefore, welfare reform, it 
seems to me, has stopped short of accomplishing the real mission which 
it should be, and that is to bring these families up to economic self-
sufficiency, to a matter of economic security.
  One of the real mistakes I think that we made in the enactment of 
TANF in 1996 is that we did not consider these families as being those 
that might benefit from education. We have 1 year vocational training 
as a work activity, but for many of the individuals on welfare, 
additional educational opportunities ought to be provided. That is the 
number one goal of legislation that I have introduced in the House last 
November, which now enjoys 90 cosponsors. And it looks to the welfare 
reform legislation from the perspective of the recipient, not from the 
perspective of the mechanic, the percentages that are being held or the 
percentages that are being gotten off of welfare or all of those 
mathematical statistical charts.
  What we have done in the bill I introduced, H.R. 3113, is to look to 
see how it impacted the families, and as a result of the legislation, 
H.R. 3113 currently enjoys the support and endorsement of over 80 
organizations throughout the country, the YWCA, the National League of 
Women Voters, a large number of women's organizations, Business 
Professional Women, Center for Women Policy Studies, and on and on.
  These individuals have not come on to support the legislation as 
casual observers. In most instances, they have participated in the 
writing of the bill from, again, the perspective of the child, of the 
family, of the single parent, to see what we could do to enhance their 
condition, their standing in our society.
  The people on welfare have to be looked at as individuals who want 
desperately to improve their condition, and I think that the major item 
that is missing in the current law and in the Bush administration's 
proposal is the importance of education.
  Our bill hopes to consider education as a work activity. The law says 
one must be in a work activity. So in order to comply with the law, and 
not to be sanctioned for failure to comply, we must first of all say 
education is a

[[Page H1276]]

work activity, and if we do that, then it would enable families to 
continue on to junior college, community colleges, major colleges and 
universities, to get substantial education so that they could really 
basically improve the future sustainability of the finances of their 
family. I think that is terribly important.
  President Bush for his initial thrust, when he came to this Chamber 
and addressed the country from that podium there, he said that we must 
not leave any child behind. Following that message, we passed a major 
education bill, elementary and secondary education, H.R. 1, as it went 
through this House, and today it is Public Law 107-110. And the whole 
approach is that we have to uplift the standards of our public 
educational system so that no child in America is deprived of the basic 
opportunities to earn an education and to be somebody to the best of 
their talents and abilities.
  That is the approach I think we should be taking with welfare reform. 
What can we do to uplift and enhance the quality of life of these 
children? It is still aid to dependent children, even if we call it 
temporary assistance for needy families. It is still based upon what 
can we do to support, help these children.
  I think, for instance, that care giving is an important 
responsibility of all parents, not just those in the middle class and 
in the upper middle class and the rich, to be free and able to stay 
home and care for their own children, nurture them, raise them until 
they are school age. That should be the social, moral responsibility 
that is recognized by government for all mothers. But we do not do that 
in TANF. We do not do that in this welfare reform law that we enacted 
in 1996, nor do we do that in the current reauthorization versions that 
have been submitted.
  Instead, we say that everyone on welfare must go to work, must have a 
self-sufficiency plan, must perform 40 hours of work, because we must 
train these individuals to understand what work responsibility is, and 
we ignore the fact that nurturing a child at home is as important a 
responsibility as engaging oneself in a minimum wage job.
  Furthermore, many of these parents, in a collection of comments that 
I have been reading through in a publication called Faces of Change, 
written by welfare recipients and those that have left welfare and are 
now engaged in work, how troubled they are because they come from 
troubled families. They have many difficulties in their own personal 
situations. They have sickness in their family, a child that is 
asthmatic, or there are mental difficulties and other kinds of health 
difficulties within the family that makes steady employment almost 
impossible. And certainly if the child care is not adequate, they raise 
the concerns of the mother even more.
  So I think we have to bear in mind that the individuals who are on 
welfare need to have this special consideration. The legislation that I 
have put forth, H.R. 3113, explicitly says for the nonschool-age 
children that the option ought to be left to the mother to decide 
whether to remain at home and to care for these small children. Even 
with the children who are in school, the teenagers who are apt to get 
into trouble, apt to find themselves in difficulty, need a parent at 
home.
  Many of these parents who write their story say the only job they 
could get was something at night that brought them home at 5 or 6 
o'clock in the morning. Their teenaged children were left unsupervised. 
How can we say that this is in the best interests of the children of 
these poor families not to have an adult or parent there to supervise 
them when they are home from school?
  We do not have after-school programs also in many places, and as a 
consequence, school is over after 2 or 3 o'clock, these teenage 
children, age 14, 15, are out on the street. No one is at home to take 
care of them, because under our TANF law the parent is required to 
work; and now, under the new proposals, to work not just 30 hours but 
to work the full 40 hours, not necessarily in compensated work, because 
the assumption is that if they cannot get compensated work, they ought 
to be doing volunteer work or doing workfare for the State or for some 
charitable institution.
  I think that this is all very, very wrong. It does not accord the 
respect to our mothers in this country who are struggling to raise 
their children. Just because they are on welfare, they do not love 
their children any less. They do not have any lesser responsibilities 
for their children. And therefore it seems to me that we need to put 
first things first, and that is to enact legislation that carries with 
it this sense of responsibility of this government and of the States 
for its smallest citizens, for the children.
  So I am hoping that this perspective can come into the discussion and 
the debate as we work these bills in the two committees. The Committee 
on Education and the Workforce will be doing markup, the bill was only 
introduced yesterday, but will be doing markup next Wednesday. And I am 
told that the Committee on Ways and Means also has an expedited 
schedule.
  The general public is not going to have adequate time to reflect on 
it, to react to it, to contact the Members of Congress to express their 
personal objections to the various changes that the administration is 
proposing, and therefore I take this means today to heighten the 
awareness of the community out there, which I know is engaged in this 
subject, and ask for their attention and urge them to contact members 
of the Committee on Ways and Means and of the Committee on Education 
and the Workforce and to convey their concerns about the recipients of 
welfare, or the children and the children's welfare, and not to enact 
stricter requirements on work which will make it even harder for these 
families to survive.
  I would like at this time to yield to my colleague who serves on the 
Committee on Education and the Workforce, has been a stalwart defender 
of the rights of families and mothers, and works hard to benefit the 
children of America. She is also a cochair of the Task Force on Welfare 
Reform on the Democratic side, and she has been working very, very hard 
to try to amass public opinion, learned discussions about this subject, 
so that this House can have the benefit of the best information, best 
records that we can put together. And I am really pleased at this time 
to yield to my colleague, the gentlewoman from California (Ms. 
Woolsey).
  Ms. WOOLSEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague the gentlewoman from 
Hawaii (Mrs. Mink) for the partnership she provides for me in this 
House of Representatives. I appreciate it so much.
  We might want to just talk back and forth a bit, because I think 
there is a lot we can talk about that I think is so important. My 
colleague may have said most of it, but I think it bears repeating.
  In 1996 when we passed welfare reform, after both of us voting 
against it because it did not provide a safety net for children, we 
warned the President, then Bill Clinton, and our colleagues, many of 
whom agreed with us and voted with us, that getting women off of 
welfare and into jobs would not be enough, that just could not be the 
end result of welfare reform, and we warned them that that was 
particularly important to look at if there was a downturn in our 
economy.
  We did not mean to be prophetic. I mean, we did not want to be seers. 
We just knew, and there it is. We were right, because this recent 
economic downturn has exposed the problem that we talked about in the 
1996 welfare reform bill.
  The guiding principle of 1996 reform was that welfare was the enemy. 
But the enemy was not welfare, and we knew it. The enemy, and still is, 
is poverty. When I hear people brag about how successful welfare reform 
has been, I wonder how they are measuring the success. I know how they 
are measuring the success. We both do. The success of welfare reform 
must be measured by how we break down the cycle of poverty, not how 
many people have left the welfare rolls.

                              {time}  1730

  First of all, we do not know that everybody that has left the welfare 
rolls has gone to work. We just know how many people are no longer on 
welfare.
  We have to measure when we are looking at the success of welfare 
reform, we have to measure if families have become self-sufficient, 
which means that they are able to raise their

[[Page H1277]]

families, that they have enough money for housing, enough money for 
health care, they have enough money for child care and the 
transportation that they need to get back and forth to their jobs and 
to take their children to school and the market. That is self-
sufficiency. We are not saying that they have to live in mini-mansions. 
We are saying that they have a right to have a roof over their head; 
and when they are working every day and playing by the rules, they 
deserve to feel self-sufficient.
  President Bush wants to increase the requirement to 40 hours a week 
from what is currently 30. The only way this requirement is going to 
work is if we count education as work. I know the gentlewoman just 
discussed this, but if we want self-sufficiency and women particularly 
to go from welfare and get out of poverty, we have to see that they 
have education and training to qualify for jobs that pay a livable 
wage.
  Mr. Speaker, to that end I have introduced legislation called the 
Education Counts Act. What this does is allows education activities to 
count as work activities and not be counted against a welfare recipient 
who is going to school in order in the long run to earn a real living. 
Rather than penalize them, the clock is ticking and her welfare limits 
are disappearing while she is at school, I think that we should stop 
the clock entirely because only by giving women access to education and 
training will they have the background and skills needed for jobs that 
pay a livable wage so they can become self-sufficient.
  Also, if we expect women to go to school or to go to work, in 
particular, because that is what the goal of the President's plan is, 
to put everybody into jobs, whether or not those jobs pay a livable 
wage, and if we want families to transition into self-sufficiency, we 
have to make sure that we have good child care available, quality child 
care and enough child care because we have to ensure that moms can free 
their minds when they are at work and know that their children are well 
cared for. By quality and availability I mean also nighttime work and 
weekend work. That is very important.
  A lot of welfare moms are going into jobs working weekends and at 
night, and there is no child care available for them and for their 
children. We cannot afford to leave our children behind, and what is 
happening in the President's proposed welfare bill is flat-funding 
child care, which does not account for any increase in costs; and in 
the long run, it means a cut in child care when we need an increase 
because we are increasing the number of hours that these moms are 
expected to go to work.
  Just as welfare recipients need to be held accountable for working 
their way off welfare, States have to be held accountable for how they 
use the taxpayers' money earmarked for welfare programs. The current 
system rewards States for lowering the number of families on welfare 
without any regard to what happens to those families. That could be 
throwing money out the window because if States are not helping 
families be self-sufficient, then they are keeping families subsidized 
in the long run, and that costs money.
  Mr. Speaker, I have introduced the Self-Sufficiency Act, which helps 
States figure out how much it would cost for families in their States 
to be actually self-sufficient, to take care of their children without 
any public assistance. Once States have this information, they can 
better allocate resources to help families move towards self-
sufficiency.
  In doing that, they will be looking at housing costs, transportation 
costs, child care costs, and health care costs in their communities. 
Every community is different. Some are higher and some are lower, and 
each State can look at that individually.
  I know what it means to need a leg up, to need some help, to hit hard 
times and realize that there is no place else to go but to one's 
government for help.
  Mr. Speaker, 35 years ago my children's father left us when my 
children were 1, 3 and 5. He was emotionally and mentally ill, and 
would not get help for his illness, and plain abandoned us. Lucky me, I 
had good job skills, some college education; and I was able to go to 
work because my children were solely my responsibility. It never 
entered my mind that I was not going to take care of them.
  In order to have the health care that we needed and the child care 
coverage and the food stamps, I went on Aid for Dependent Children 
while I was working. Without that, we would not be where we are today. 
That was exactly the safety net that it took, and it took 3 years for 
this mom with an education. I was very healthy; my children were 
healthy. Members have to know I was assertive. I could get through the 
system. I knew what needed to be done, but I could not do it without 
that help. And that was 35 years ago. It is way more difficult for 
young mothers now. It has never entered my mind, I did it, so can you.

  Lucky me, I have four great, grown children; and I am a Member of 
Congress. My kids are successful in what they do in their lives, and I 
am here as a Member of the House of Representatives; and I can tell 
Members, we have paid back what the government invested in us many, 
many, many times over. But I can also tell Members if we had not had 
that help, I do not know what we would have done.
  Mr. Speaker, I ask the public and I ask my colleagues, please, 
please, do not be hesitant to invest in young families and in moms who 
have fallen on hard times. Do not assume that if someone is having a 
bad time, they did it on their own and deserve it, and if they were 
worth their salt they would not be there in the first place because 
that is just not true for any of the people who are in need today.
  Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Hawaii (Mrs. Mink) for 
being part of the welfare task force with me. We know that the things 
that we need to be concentrating on child care, education counting as 
work, flexibility in the welfare system, making sure that individuals 
who have domestic abuse problems, substance abuse problems, mental 
illness, language difficulties, making sure that they get an 
opportunity to get their situations together before the clock starts 
ticking on them will make a difference in ensuring that welfare makes 
work pay and count, and these people all count.
  Mrs. MINK of Hawaii. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from 
California (Ms. Woolsey) for her contribution here today. It is very 
powerful, especially her own personal explanation of how much the 
program meant to her and her young family.
  I think that is the message that we have to carry to our colleagues, 
that these individuals who are on welfare having hard times, they are 
worthy parents. They care about their children. They do not want to do 
anything to damage their future; but in many cases they need the time 
and the education, they need the training and they need the assurance 
that there is quality child care before they are forced off to work.
  I thank the gentlewoman for her contribution to this afternoon. We 
will engage the House, I am sure, on many of these issues as we go to 
our markup in the committee and full committee and eventually on the 
floor.
  Ms. WOOLSEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman and look forward to 
working with her in getting the message across that the enemy is 
poverty, the enemy is not welfare or the welfare recipient. The enemy 
is poverty. If we can get that message across and do something about 
it, we will have helped welfare recipients as well as the working poor.
  Mrs. MINK of Hawaii. Mr. Speaker, I think all of us want to do what 
we can to provide a safety net. Every President that I have worked with 
talks about the necessity of a social safety net. That is really all 
that the welfare program is. It is a safety net for families that have 
fallen on hard times, have recently gotten divorced, or lost a family 
member, as my colleague explained in her situation; and they need a 
helping hand. They should not be treated as though they are of less 
worth and dignity than all of us. We want their children to have the 
benefit of the best possible family situation that they could have.
  In talking about welfare benefits, I think Members have the feeling 
that there is this huge amount of money that is being remitted to the 
families on welfare, and that is certainly not true. The amounts of 
money that are allocated per month can be gotten by downloading the 
Congressional Research Service. It has a list of each

[[Page H1278]]

State and what they pay each month to a family, family of one, two, 
three, four, five or six. Let us pick a family of three, that is, a 
single mom and two children. Alabama's monthly benefit for a family 
with two children is $164. One is barely able to keep oneself together 
with that amount of money; and yet we are saying to these families that 
they must go out to work and improve themselves. Arkansas is $204 a 
month; Delaware, $338; Florida, $303; Idaho, $293; Indiana, $288; 
Kentucky, $262; Louisiana, $240; Mississippi, $170; Missouri, $292; 
North Carolina, $272; Ohio, $373; Oklahoma, $292; South Carolina, $203; 
Tennessee, $185; Texas, $201. The list is available for public 
scrutiny.
  I recite this list of those that are in the lower threshold of 
monthly compensation to give Members an idea that we are not talking 
about very large sums of money that they are receiving to just tide 
themselves over. In addition, they have Medicaid and food stamps, and 
usually housing assistance as well to help them through.
  So this work idea is to try to uplift them from their condition of 
dependency upon the State, but it is not a lot of money. So the notion 
is how do we uplift them; and it seems to me that the most logical 
thing that we can do is to help them improve themselves through 
education and to fill the jobs that are available in teaching, nursing, 
in high tech, in other kinds of occupations that are available.
  The requirement of 40 hours is really punitive in rural America. I 
represent a rural district. I do not see how we are going to find jobs 
to fill the requirement of 40 hours. We cannot even fill the 30 hours 
in my remote areas on the Big Island, on Maui, Molokai, and Kauai.

                              {time}  1745

  So I think that there has to be flexibility. Like my colleague the 
gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey) suggested, we have to give 
States flexibility. We know that they can exempt 20 percent of their 
population. That is already in the old law. No one seems to be changing 
that. We have to bear in mind that in some areas of America it is just 
not possible to get a job, so we have to think of other alternatives. 
Certainly an alternative is through education to uplift them, to 
qualify them for professions and careers. If we were satisfied with 
just a poverty-level compensated job and say, well, we have done our 
duty under TANF, then what we are saying is that for the rest of time, 
this family is going to receive food stamps, Medicaid, housing support 
and other kinds of support services dependent upon a condition of 
poverty. If they work, they will also get earned income tax credit 
refunds, $2,000, $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 depending on how much they earn 
and how many dependents they have.
  This is not the kind of policy that I think we want to perpetuate. 
What we want to do is to give these families the hope and the 
realization that our government policy is going to recognize self-
betterment.
  And so if a woman, a single parent, wants to go to college, get a 
degree in nursing or some other profession, that should be encouraged, 
not discouraged by not considering it part of the program. Our bill is 
very modest. The gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey) and myself 
in our bills provide that education is a work activity. So when the law 
says you must be in a work activity, going to school constitutes a work 
activity, and you cannot be penalized because you decided that you 
wanted to go to school. The colleges can decide whether the individual 
is sustaining herself by keeping up her grades and attendance and so 
forth, and so those kinds of requirements can be levied. Going to 
college, that family will have Pell grants, undoubtedly, being on 
welfare. That will help to pay the tuition and other costs of getting 
there, transportation and so forth. She can probably qualify for work-
study, so that she can produce some work hours and earn some money at 
the same time. This is the sort of support that a safety network ought 
to provide.
  The TANF legislation that we passed in 1996 completely ignores this 
part of our government responsibility. We have passed countless pieces 
of legislation having to do with higher education, expanding the 
opportunity of young people to go to college. It should be no different 
for a family person who is on the welfare rolls. That person ought to 
have the same encouragement to get off welfare by getting an education 
that will then sustain that family at a salary that would lift them up 
from poverty so that they do not have to rely on food stamps, housing 
subsidies, earned income tax credit and all the rest of it.
  So I think that this comprehensive look at what welfare reform should 
be, not just getting any job, but lifting people out of poverty, 
enhancing their condition and making it possible for the children of 
these families to have the kind of family life, family stability, with 
somebody who will be able to nurture them, carry them on to college 
because they themselves have had that opportunity.
  It is this outlook that we hope to engage this House further upon as 
we take this bill up in subcommittee and full committee and bring the 
matter to the floor. It is expected that this legislation will come 
before us sometime in early or mid-May. So we have not much time. I 
invite the enlarged community to contribute their thoughts and views, 
because there are many, many organizations out there that have 
contributed already, in the hundreds of meetings that they have 
conducted where they have consulted with welfare recipients, and we 
have learned so much from them about the agony of raising families and 
how difficult it is to match the requirements of the law with their 
responsibilities for their families.

  I am delighted that we are joined here by my dear friend, the 
distinguished gentlewoman from North Carolina (Mrs. Clayton) who has, I 
am sure, many words of advice to give us on this very, very important 
area, particularly rural America which I was just talking about.
  Mrs. CLAYTON. I want to thank the gentlewoman very much for holding 
this special order and raising this whole issue of welfare reform and 
giving us the opportunity, our colleagues and the American people, to 
know that this is an issue that is being debated and which the 
President now has made a proposal. We know Ways and Means will be 
debating those areas and the committee on which the gentlewoman from 
Hawaii serves, the Committee on Education and the Workforce.
  We have a unique opportunity in the reauthorization of welfare-to-
work. The whole idea for welfare-to-work was indeed to move people from 
dependency to independence. In our State we call it Work First. You 
have an opportunity to try to find a job. The requirement was to make 
sure you entered into those kinds of activities to prepare you for a 
job, and the State, supposedly with the assistance of the Federal 
Government, was supposed to do that. There was not a policy that we 
were going to move people out of poverty. That would have been a better 
one, but it was that we were moving people to work.
  But we have learned some things during that process. I would caution 
us that even some of the things we have learned from State studies may 
not be as reflective as it should be, because when you understand that 
our State as a whole may have some areas that work better than others, 
we have some parts of our States that have more opportunities for jobs, 
more opportunities to move people to work, and you have some places 
where I come from, the rural areas, where there is indeed a great 
decline in low-skill jobs. The economy, as we know, has depressed even 
those jobs who were upward mobile and diminished agriculture 
opportunity, so we are having less opportunities to move people into.
  Also, when we look at what we are doing or, better still, we are 
looking at how Governors in the States may use waivers. They use 
waivers in a variety of ways. Sometimes it is more of an advantage to 
the Governor or a State than it is to the individual communities for 
that. For instance, they can use waivers to exempt areas that have a 
high concentration of unemployment. But if the State looks at it as a 
whole, they may not see that, because the State as a whole may be in 
that. So States have not used those waivers to target resources 
strategically where people have opportunities or people have a lack of 
opportunities. I think we have some opportunity to refine that.

[[Page H1279]]

  The area that I am most interested in, and I am interested in all of 
them, but is the area of day care and child care. The child care 
capacity for parents who have very young children, if we expect them to 
be independent, they need to have the assurance that there is adequate, 
safe, child care and affordable child care. In rural areas, just having 
the access almost to any child care is not there. And then to have the 
assurance that you have placed your child in a qualified, well-
equipped, designed, child care facility is almost remote, particularly 
when you understand that child care gets to be expensive.
  And if you are not investing in training the personnel, if you are 
not investing in the infrastructure of the community college, or you 
are not creating opportunities for nonprofits or faith-based 
organizations to provide that child care, saying that people should 
find child care without providing for it I think is not only grossly 
negligent, I think it is unforgivable when we are expecting that this 
should be strengthening families.

  One whole premise is strengthening families. Very few families I know 
of think they are strengthening their family if they throw their kids 
at just any place without regard to the quality and the safety of it, 
and then when you are not affording the kind of reimbursement.
  As you begin to craft the bill, I hope you will understand that there 
is some differential between our urban communities and our rural 
communities. The suffering may be the same. I am not arguing against 
anything that should go in the urban areas, but the infrastructure is 
different. We have to travel longer periods of time, for a longer 
distance, for health care, for education, for shopping. We travel for 
job opportunities. If you are going to ignore the lack of 
transportation to facilitate this, then you will have put my district 
and my communities within my district at a disadvantage.
  So in order to make sure that there is access to that, child care 
must be there. That means providing sufficient money for training as 
well as reimbursement for opportunities.
  Then when you think about actually getting to a job, if I live 10 
miles from the Wal-Mart that is going to hire me, by the way for $7 an 
hour, chances of me getting a car on $7 and paying for it, hey, as our 
young kids say, we need to get real if we really want this to happen.
  I think we want to make the welfare bill even better. We just do not 
want to have statistics that say we have moved people off of welfare. 
Moving people off welfare is much easier, I submit to you, than moving 
people off welfare into meaningful work, where they can move from 
dependency to self-sufficiency, working, advancing themselves.
  Finally, the whole issue of education of the welfare mother or the 
welfare adult, that is critical not only to the economy of our district 
but also to the stability of that person working and not going from 
welfare to work, laid off. If we understand, if we invest in their 
upward mobility by providing them training on a continuous basis, we 
are investing not only in the statistic of movement from welfare, but 
we are investing in the vitality of our community and a statistical 
reality that these people will stay as employed persons.
  I commend the gentlewoman for giving attention to this. I just urge 
as you go forward that you will consider those infrastructure needs as 
well as the distance and the economies of scale and what that means in 
putting the same kinds of programs that we would have in urban areas, 
where things are relatively close to each other, and there may be a 
sufficient infrastructure there that would accommodate day care, where 
there are well-established church day cares or well-established 
nonprofits, and even for-profits.
  They are not in my communities, unfortunately. I wish they were 
there. We have to find a way to give some incentives to those 
nonprofits or faith-based organizations investing in child care. We 
have to find ways of accommodating transportation in rural areas for 
the purpose of both education as well as for employment. We also have 
to find adequate resources to reimburse people for the day care.
  Finally, the education of our mothers and people who are dependent is 
not only investing in that individual, which is worthy in and of 
itself, but we are investing in the vitality of that community and the 
stability of that community.
  Again, I commend the gentlewoman for her leadership in this area. By 
the way, I say to you, we are trying to relieve the responsibility of 
food stamps out of day care. I am a part of the agriculture conference 
committee, and part of the idea as we considered that was to try to 
reform and bring new quality to food stamps. You remember, food stamps 
and welfare reform are partners. If you examine who is getting food 
stamps now, a little better than half of the people who are getting 
food stamps are working families. And if you take who those people may 
be, they are children of working families as well as their parents; and 
then senior citizens and children, just combine those alone, are over 
60 percent.
  So making food stamps and the transition from welfare or Work First 
to work, having the ability to supplement that $7-an-hour job I talked 
about with food stamps with a family of three, that is a big help. And 
so we want to make sure that that goes in tandem with it. Just as 
Medicaid has been made a little easier for the transition, we are 
trying to make an alignment between Medicaid and welfare reform and 
food stamps, so that this will be a part of the package we put together 
in enabling the tools for a person moving from welfare to have those 
additional tools to supplement a very low-wage job.

                              {time}  1800

  Mrs. MINK of Hawaii. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I commend the 
gentlewoman for her contributions, and I certainly hope that in her 
conference on the farm bill that she can work this alignment so that 
the families that are moving off of welfare getting their minimum wage 
job will have easier access to food stamps.
  Right now we are told that many of them fall between the cracks, 
because the eligibility requirements are so different and nobody is 
there to help them qualify, so many of these families, though they are 
eligible income-wise, are not really getting this benefit at all.
  Mrs. CLAYTON. We are very hopeful, and I think it is moving in the 
right direction.
  Mrs. MINK of Hawaii. Wonderful. We had the opportunity to hear from 
Secretary Tommy Thompson the other day. He came and testified about the 
importance of child care. I want to say that I was very impressed with 
the passion with which he made his comments about child care, that you 
cannot have a national policy that requires work of single-parent 
families unless you provide adequate quality child care. So I think we 
have a friend there as far as the concept is concerned, but the 
mechanics of making this statement a reality for families is still 
short. It is not there.
  In our bill, H.R. 3113, we say that if the government is not able to 
find child care for a family that it is requiring work activity out of, 
then the family is exempt from finding work activity until such child 
care can be made available, and the clock stops. It seems to me that is 
simple justice. If we believe that the work requirement cannot be 
enforced without child care, then we cannot put sanctions and penalties 
upon the family for something over which they have no control.
  So I am hoping that we can work together with the administration and 
with Secretary Thompson to clarify this, because he feels that this is 
already current law, that if you cannot get child care, you are not 
required to go to work. But there is nothing in the legislation that 
exempts such a family from sanctions or from other kinds of 
prohibitions. So I hope we can work that out.
  Child care is so important. There is a set-aside that requires the 
States, from the Federal monies it gets under TANF, to improve child 
care under the quality child care requirement. And I think that we need 
to up that ante, perhaps double it from 4 to 8 percent, so that more 
attention is given to quality child care services and not just simply 
child care and assume that the State has fulfilled its responsibility 
by finding any child care that might be available.
  I think that these parents are entitled to have quality child care, 
and we

[[Page H1280]]

should be moving in that direction. Part of the problem is that we are 
not able to pay the individuals who work in these child care centers 
sufficient income to make it worthwhile for them to qualify as early 
childhood education personnel, so with their low pay and low 
expectations, we cannot upgrade the child care centers in the way we 
should be.
  There are many aspects to this issue that are very important. The 
stop-the-clock things on education and child care, drug treatment 
services that might be needed by that family, domestic violence, sexual 
abuse conditions, any severe mental illness or physical illness ought 
to exempt that family from the work requirements.
  So I hope that we look at this legislation from the perspective of 
the family and how hard they are struggling to comply, rather than 
impose new requirements that are based upon percentage of participation 
or performance rates that the States are required to do. Rural America 
cannot possibly meet the 70 percent work requirement that the 
administration is asking. There are simply no jobs to which these 
individuals could find any sort of satisfaction of employment.
  So I think we have to bear that in mind and find some way in which we 
can soften the requirement based upon flexibilities given to the States 
or waiver provisions given to the States where we have large rural 
populations with high unemployment rates. I think that is a very 
important quest that we must make in this reauthorization.
  Mr. Speaker, I thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to 
expound on an issue that is very important to me and to 90 other 
Members of the House. I include for the Record a list of the 80 
organizations that endorse H.R. 3113.

   Groups That Have Endorsed H.R. 3113, the TANF Reauthorization Act

       1. Acercamiento Hispano/Hispanic Outreach.
       2. African American Women's Clergy Assn.
       3. American Civil Liberties Union.
       4. Americans for Democratic Action.
       5. American Friends Service Committee.
       6. Arizona Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
       7. Ayuda Inc.
       8. Business and Professional Women/USA.
       9. California Food Policy Advocates.
       10. California Welfare Justice Coalition.
       11. Campaign for America's Future.
       12. Center for Battered Women's Legal Services at Sanctuary 
     for Families.
       13. Center for Community Change.
       14. Center for Third World Organizing.
       15. Center for Women Policy Studies.
       16. The Center for Women and Families.
       17. Center on Fathers, Families and Public Policy.
       18. Central Conference of American Rabbis.
       19. Chicago Women in Trades.
       20. Child Care Action Campaign.
       21. Child Care Law Center.
       22. Choice USA.
       23. Church Women United.
       24. College Opportunity to Prepare for Employment (COPE).
       25. Communications Workers of America.
       26. Covenant House Washington.
       27. Family Violence Prevention Fund.
       28. Florida CHAIN (Communications Health Information Action 
     Network).
       29. Friends Committee on National Legislation (Quaker).
       30. (GROWL) Grass Roots Organizing for Welfare Leadership.
       31. Harbor Communities Overcoming Violence (HarborCOV).
       32. Harlem Fight Back.
       33. HELP USA.
       34. Human Services Coalition of Dade County, Inc.
       35. Hunger Action Network of NYS.
       36. Jewish Women International.
       38. Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger & Homelessness.
       39. Mothers on the Move Committee of the Philadelphia 
     Unemployment Project.
       40. National Association of Service and Conservation Corps.
       41. National Association of Commissions for Women.
       42. National Center on Poverty Law.
       43. National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
       44. National Coalition of 100 Black Women, Metropolitan 
     Atlanta Chapter
       45. National Council of La Raza.
       46. National Employment Law Project.
       47. National League of Women Voters of the U.S.
       48. National Organization for Women.
       49. National Urban League.
       50. National Welfare Rights Union.
       51. NETWORK, A National Catholic Social Justice Lobby.
       52. New Directions Center.
       53. New Mexico Center on Law & Poverty.
       54. Nontraditional Employment for Women.
       55. NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund.
       56. North Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
       57. Ohio Domestic Violence Network.
       58. Oregon Law Center.
       59. Public Justice Center.
       60. Research Institute for Independent Living.
       61. RESULTS.
       62. Rural Law Center of NY, Inc.
       63. Safe Horizon.
       64. Southeast Asia Resource Action Center.
       65. The Miles Foundation.
       66. The Union of American Hebrew Congregations.
       67. Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.
       68. United States Student Association.
       69. Welfare Made A Difference Campaign.
       70. Welfare Rights Organizing Coalition.
       71. Welfare-to-work Advocacy Project.
       72. Wider Opportunities for Women.
       73. Wisconsin Council on Children and Families.
       74. Women and Poverty Public Education Initiative.
       75. Women's Committee of 100.
       76. Women Employed.
       77. Women Empowered Against Violence, Inc. (WEAVE).
       78. Women's Housing and Economic Development Corporation 
     (WHEDCO).
       79. Workforce Alliance.
       80. YWCA of the USA.

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